Spot on. Don't call my house if I haven't given you my number or it's not an emergency.

Amy,

I never get calls like that. Not saying you should do the same as me, but I use 2 different internet phone services and have a cell phone with the same area code as my relatives back home.

Not sure what regular landline service runs now, but the combination of all three is lower cost and less hassle than what I remember my old landline phone being.

Paid off? No Amy, this is what 'less' government is. You don't like the government making rules to dictate your life, well that's what you get, rules that don't dictate their lives, either.

John, I'd like to go VOIP to save money, but Gregg thinks it's too risky. It's worked for some, but I have other friends it was a nightmare for, who switched back. Anybody have experiences with it -- good, bad, better, ugly?

I do use Skype to Skype for some long distance calls. It's working much better now than it was.

Yeah, its cheaper all right. Politicians drive me nuts about it. My state rep is one of the worst offenders. She had a close race with a repub guy about 6 years ago and both went all out in the phone wars. I got fed up with it so I emailed her. Of course I had to dig through her website and find out that her "official" campaign address was dead and the one that worked was a personal aol one. Gee, how impressive, you can spend oodles of money on flyers and phone calls but not even 200 bucks (or free if you get a family/friend to do it) for a decent website.

Anyway, long story short she was rather indignant and said that it was "how we got the message out". Election porn I can handle (unless its been paid for by taxes), it goes in the recycling bin unread often enough, the phone calls at dinner time or coming home to a new one every other day is a different matter.

The worst these days is the credit card/car warranty bastards. I got a credit rate reduction call the other day on my rarely used cell phone. The gal who answered the line wasn't happy to hear me I'm sure.

Does scype have video? I've been using oovoo to video call my sister in utah

I just turned my land line off today because of this annoyance. I figure that anyone who knows me has my cell phone number anyway. I will screen my calls on the cell phone and if I don't recognize the number I won't answer. All the junk calls have done is to lead many to conclude that they don't need a landline anymore. The phone company should have been paying me to keep the thing turned on in my house. Instead they had the audacity to charge me for getting 60 junk calls a month and darn few legitimate ones.

We are in NY and use Skype +webcams for relatives everywhere.

For our impoverished student son (in the UK) we ordered a huge, surprise Indian takeaway meal from a local restaurant to be delivered to his digs (shared with 8 fellow & equally skint students) at a specific time on his birthday. By pretending we wanted him to show us his kitchen, we got him to carry his laptop with the webcam downstairs - timing our birthday skype just as the takeaway delivery guy rang at his front door with $200 worth of tandoori etc in foil packages. So we watched - beaming - in Long Island as the students on the west coast of the UK fell on the takeaway guy like starving zombies!

Voyeur cam Amy, voyeur cam.

Your hit rate will skyrocket!

I don't know his phone number, but I did see his meathead outside of that sushi restaurant on San Vicente about 3 weeks ago (Katsuya, thank you Google).
If I see him again, I'll be happy to pass along your sentiments. "Send her a fucking letter!"

Amy,
I use Packet8 for my VOIP service. I haven't gotten any calls on it for the shills, so until it comes up via a random number generator, I'm happy. Besides, the caller Id function works as part of the package, so if I don't know the number, I let it go to voicemail. Granted, you'll hear the phone ring and that's what usually bothers people, not just the answering of the phone.
I also pay Verizon a king's ransom ($2.50 per month) for an unpublished home address and home phone number, but again, random number generators can and will come up with it. Hopefully, they would honor the do not call list (unlike the charity shills).

Who's Rob Reiner?

If I see him again, I'll be happy to pass along your sentiments. "Send her a fucking letter

Please do. And get his phone number for me, if you don't mind. He's called me at home; I owe him one.

As for SM777's question, that was my question exactly, when I got the call -- well, more like "Who the fuck does he think he is to disturb me in my home?"

Have you tried 867-5309?

Cute! Haven't heard that one for a while.

I looked up "Rob Reiner" on the IMDB.COM site and discovered that he's "meathead" from All In The Family.

Yep. Dead from the neck up as Archie Bunker used to say.

Oh, just one more question.

What was "meathead" calling about anyway?

I used SightSpeed until their POTS connectivity went belly up. They had so, so quality and reliability, but low prices.

I'm using Vonage now. Their quality and reliability is better, but still not at the level of a traditional phone and their echo cancellation sometimes doesn't quite cut it.

Skype is fine if you don't mind that their technology is proprietary and that they use your bandwidth for other people's calls.

I've never gotten anything worse than wrong number calls on any of my IP numbers or my cell phone. My wife got a few car warranty calls on her cell phone and even those have stopped. I'm not sure what the pattern is.

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